10 Written by Thomas Miller

    Dap and Bruce patrol farther down the beach, the sky pinking up like frostbitten flesh beginning to thaw.  The streaking meteors increase in number and intensity, even as the dawn’s advance washes them out.  Dap clicks on his flashlight and shines it ineffectually toward a long black smudge a hundred yards ahead.  It lies half on the sand, half in the water, pale white suds of surf piled up around it.  “Blixie’s dead body,” says Dap, grinning. Bruce tries to chuckle at that, but the laugh sticks in his throat.  He coughs, high and wheezing. “I think it’s a log,” says Dap.  “That last one”
    A wave retreats across the object.  There’s a glint of metal.  The two men stumble toward it, then run full out.  Dap has dropped his flashlight.  Bruce is fumbling through his pockets for his phone.  “Log with pants and a windbreaker,” says Bruce as they sprint nearer. Face down in the water, his legs splayed, Blix lies motionless.  The surf washes up to his waist.  The waves pull at his hair as they recede.  Frost shines along the collar of his jacket. They cannot turn the body over, they will not.  They dare not.  They do. “Shit, he’s heavy,” says Dap, as they roll Blix.
“The mango-matic diet,” says Bruce, straining, his voice involuntarily taking on the melodic cadence of the Tropical Weightloss spokesman.  “Twenty percent guarantee that you’ll lose twenty pounds.”
    Venus hangs in the eastern sky, fat and white, glowing with the force of a hundred ordinary stars, throwing down its reflected light most strongly in the minutes before dawn.  Bruce has never been able to distinguish the colors of stars.  Venus is yellow, he’s been told; Betelgeuse, red; Aldeberan, orange.  They look only white to him.  It must be some kind of colorblindness, a failure of vision, a moral shortcoming.  He wonders if some men see the stars in a thousand colors.  Dull blues and searing greens, a billion-year-old astral code spelled out across the heavens.
    Bruce is on his knees in the seafoam at Blix’s head.  The water soaks into Bruce’s jeans, seeps through his longjohns.  Bruce peels off his gloves.  He presses his hand against Blix’s neck.  Cold and wet.  He waits for a pulse, for a sign of life.  Bruce’s fingers get stiff.  They go numb.
    Overhead, two more meteors flash by, the last before the rising sun blots them out entirely.  And without meaning to, Bruce is counting: two hundred ninety-eight, two hundred ninety-nine.

Posted on February 9th, 2009 in Fiction